It’s often convenient to force existing animations to have specific fixed dimensions, that is, to matt them within a colored rectangle. This is easily to accomplish in GIF Construction Set Professional, although the process of doing so might not be immediately obvious.

The Alchemy Mindworks 3D Effects #1 plugin can create rotating three-dimensional objects with your choice of still graphics affixed to their faces. Adding pictures to these objects is easy, and if you understand what’s going on behind the curtain, your pictures can look sharp and sophisticated.

The banner advertisement for the Alchemy Mindworks Text Effects #4 plugin has received considerable comment since it appeared in the banner rotation at our various web pages – and no small degree of interest in how it was created. The procedure was elegantly simple, but perhaps not immediately obvious. You’ll probably be able to use it for your own banners.

Depending upon who you listen to, there may be up to a billion people connected to the world wide web as you read this. Don’t get too excited – they have in excess of 100 million web pages to look at, according to a 2008 report by Domain Tools. If yours in one of them, you’ll need something more than a clever domain of your own to attract the attention of passers-by in cyberspace.

Unless you plan animations with transparent elements very carefully – or you’re habitually lucky – you’ll probably encounter an unexpected halo of colored pixels around the object being animated. Transparency halos will trash the seamless appearance of animations against whatever they’re being animated in front of. They’re easy to avoid in GIF Construction Set Professional, but you’ll need to get them by the throat early in the design of your graphics.

One of Animation Workshop‘s best tricks is its ability to create conventional GIF animations, such as web page banners, which include multiple independent animated elements. While it’s possible to simply import several animated objects into Animation Workshop and then export a GIF file from them – and hope for the best – you’ll enjoy much more impressive results if you understand what the software is really up to.

The appearance of the animations you create in GIF Construction Set Professional‘s Animation Wizard can be optimized by selecting the appropriate option in the Palette combo. Doing so may require some understanding of what the little man behind the curtain is really up to.

In building animation with GIF Construction Set’s Animation Wizard, you’ll need to create source art as still image files. It’s not immediately obvious which of the formats imported by Animation Wizard will result in the most attractive final animations, and the two most obvious ones – GIF and JPEG – turn out to be the two worst choices.